


Plague of God

by Defiler_Wyrm



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Elder God, F/F, F/M, Gen, Genderbending, Historical, Hunters & Hunting, Hunters International, Monsters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-13
Updated: 2014-01-13
Packaged: 2018-01-08 14:20:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1133672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defiler_Wyrm/pseuds/Defiler_Wyrm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once or twice a generation, a Great Comet heralds the return of douen plagues to the Caribbean Isles: monsters that lure children into the wilderness never to be seen again. Hunters have been chasing them for centuries. The last outbreak was in 2011.</p><p>Then the angels fell.</p><p>Stefan Williams and his protégé Nico Vidal have their hands full with water-spirits pushing inland like rats fleeing a sinking ship when the plagues resurface. They’ll end the cycle for good if they can root out the source before it goes dormant again – and before the stalker in the sea reaches land.</p><p>[On hiatus.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Plague of God

**Author's Note:**

> While the vast majority of the characters in this fic speak heavy dialects and/or patois and Creole languages, writing phonetic accents is a big no-no. It's awkward and annoying at best, racist as hell at worst. Thus I've opted to "translate" to Standard American English. Regrettably I'm not fluent in Jamaican patois, French Creole, Spanish, Dutch, etc, and I feel it's better to simply provide the meaning of the words than to do the characters and their countries & cultures of origin the disservice of a bad translation.

  
__  


_There were people in these islands two thousand years before the Minoans learned to leap a bull’s back. Where humans live and die, ghosts walk; and wherever ghosts walk, hunters follow._

_It is by a strange if altogether predictable set of phenomena that the collective Hunting culture of the Caribbean Islands is sparsely-known at best outside the region. To my (extensive) knowledge there have been no annals set down in my mother tongue regarding the subject. Again, this comes as no surprise. The world of hunting the supernatural is an insular one whose history is written between the lines of religious texts and occult grimoires, hidden line-by-line within countless volumes of paranoid delusion, fabrications, and psychosis. That’s before one comes to the issue of the English-speaking world’s disdain for the remainder (read: the bulk) of the human population. There is a distinct trend among historians and other academics – even among Hunters! – to treat foreign cultures as curiosities, to observe with a sense of condescending wonderment as if going among wolves._

_There shall be none of that here._

_  
_–Excerpt, _Paranormal Hunter Culture in the Antilles Islands_

• • • o o O o o • • •

 

**CUBA, 2013**

 

North-central Guantánamo has its share of ghosts. What it usually does not have is _drowned_ ghosts.

“You sure?” Nico Vidal is the sort who could read you the dictionary with facial expressions alone. Add tone to it, and you’ll be hard-pressed to meet anyone more eloquent, regardless of what words (or language) may be involved. At the moment all that expressiveness has come to bear against her mentor, and Stefan Williams is every bit as impressed with her doubting sass as she is with his assessment of the situation.

“Yeah I’m sure.” He toes at the unbroken line of salt and black dust, glancing away from where fat swirls drops of red are caught in seawater like an oxblood marble. It’s like a storm blew through this little house but the walls and roof are intact. They’re careful to touch as little as possible. The PNR hasn’t come in yet but La Lima’s a small enough place that news will travel fast, and the last thing they need is their prints on a murder scene.

Nico eyes a set of clawlike gouges in a table and presses: “Sixty kilometres inland?”

The older Hunter (not _that_ much older, he’d be quick to tell you; he only has fifteen years on his protégé thanks) gestures at the protective line: fat lot of good it did Rosa Maria there. “You show me the mountain duppy that gives no damn about salt. You show me the duppy that tears its victims up and makes ‘em choke on seawater. It’s a drowned one, it’s gotta be.” He rubs the broad bridge of his nose, thumbs the edges of his moustache, and lets his hand drop. “Maybe even a ciguapa come up from the lake.”

“The lake? I thought they stayed out on the rocks in the Caribbees and the _Lucayan Archipel_ ,” Nico blinks.

“Mostly,” Stefan shrugs, “but my old boss said they found a ciguapa in Laguna de Leche in the Fifties, so it could be.” Nico mutters that she doesn’t know where that is, which annoys him, because they’ve damn well been through the National Park five miles from there so he would’ve thought she’d’ve _seen_ the bloody thing. When he tells her as such she cuts eyes at him, but only because she’s facing the other way.

Bright-painted nails tap against a countertop bearing the remnants of shattered crockery. As an afterthought she runs a cloth soaked in holy water where she touched. “So we need a bronze knife or we need to burn some driftwood? This far from the water we’re never gonna find his bones, you know that.”

Moments tick by before Stefan responds. Nico catches his eye; he wags a finger to stave the question off a few seconds more while he thinks. This is the fourth death this month in the larger islands he’s caught wind of but the first in this province. Ciguapas are more territorial than that – they don’t island-hop – but then again drowned ghosts are never, ever found this far from the beach. The Caribbean Islands have a lot of weird shit going on any day of any week but it’s a predictable sort of weird, once one knows how to predict it. After seventeen years hunting this weirdness all across the Antilles Stefan is pretty well sure of his ability to do just that. But the carnage of this little house, the seawater, the ineffective salt, all of this breaks the pattern – it’s a spanner in the works and he doesn’t like it one bit.

“Both,” he sighs at last. “You get the driftwood, I’ll get the blade.”

Nico nods. “What about her?” She gestures, bracelets jingling, at the poor torn body of the _guajira_ lying slumped against the wall like a marionette cut from its strings. The younger Hunter has been at this seven years herself – nearly long enough to take on a protégé of her own – but her gaze still makes a nervous slide away from the corpse. It gets easier but it never gets easy.

By then Stefan’s already heading for the doorway (the door itself having been blasted from its hinges). “The usual. I’ll call the PNR, let them deal with it.”

Dealing with the dead isn’t their concern unless they stand back up.

 

• • • o o O o o • • •

 

_The bulk of Hunting history in much of the world is kept in oral traditions. The Antilles are no exception. It’s difficult to set a date to the earliest known instances of humans deliberately hunting the supernatural but it’s thought to predate the Taínos’ arrival in the Lesser Antilles. The earliest tale of Hunting in the region entails a small band of warriors led by a shaman fighting gremlin-like monsters said to have been summoned from the land of the dead by a new star – a comet. As with most cultures in which Hunting exists it was originally rolled into the duties of the priesthood, to whom it fell to appease spirits who could be convinced to act in beneficence and to confront those who could not. This is a memetic tradition alive and well today the world over (even among cultures that think themselves ‘far advanced’ from the Saladoid peoples), evidenced by the relatively high ratio of clergy members within Hunting communities and the Roman Catholic Church’s own specialised sect of exorcists. Animist cultures consider the supernatural to be a fact of life so those who deal directly with “post-human beings” are treated with reverence and may act openly._

 

• • • o o O o o • • •

 

They say a lot of things about Nicol Vidal. They say she’s burned a dead man’s bones underwater. They say she can beat men twice her size at calinda. They say she’s talked a duppy into climbing back into his grave. They say the loa smile on her and she’s not even vodoun. They call her Lord Undertow when she dons her ocean-blue suit with her braids all back and her breasts bound down, and they say (s)he shares the secrets of the hunt coded in calypso.

One way or another these are all true.

What’s certainly true is she has a silver tongue. The best driftwood’s either scavenged or, in a pinch, comes from tourist traps, and Nico can haggle like an old mercado pro. It’s a damned good thing, too. They didn’t exactly go through Customs getting here (courtesy of Stefan’s connections) and while that’s a faster way to go from one country to the next it means their usable currency out here is pretty thin, even having made the half-hour drive into El Salvador. Barter fills in when the pesos run out, and come dark she’s got enough driftwood to suit their needs.

The trick, of course, is getting back to the scene of the crime. _La policía_ don’t give an almighty damn if the spot where someone’s been murdered happens to be the last known location of a haunting, or that such a place is necessary to purge an unclean spirit; but they’re lucky. The PNR is lax out here, having figured the guilty party’s already done as much damage as he could do. They park their rental car half a kilometre away, shoulder a duffel full of ritual tools, hike around the outskirts of town til they’ve reached the late Rosa Maria’s house, and set to work.

Effigies are perhaps one of the most important contributions that West African slaves made to the Hunting culture of the islands. They’re as potent a tool now as they were centuries ago. With a drowned ghost you’ll hardly ever find remains to burn, even the more recently deceased, but with the right treatment, the right offerings, driftwood can stand in for bone. So they whittle: Stefan with strong, sure hands, Nico with long, deft fingers, lit by moonlight and silent as the grave.

They’ve spent a lot of time like this in the past six years. Hunting with a partner (or as mentor and protégé) is all about knowing when to speak up and when to shut up. It can be the difference between a successful ritual and failure. It can be the difference between dying and living another day. Carving bones is quiet work: any words they speak now can fill them up. It’s all part of that predictable weirdness their lives have become.

So they swallow down the urge to chatter as they work, and form ribs and humeri and hew a skull. Stefan digs a shallow grave; Nico breaks the silence to chant, entreating Eshu to guide the drowned one back to his bones – at least, what they’ve made tonight to stand in for the real thing. There’s red and black string to bind it when it comes, holy water to wash the evil from it, lighter fluid and matches (a Hunter mainstay no matter where you are in the world) to burn it from the earth.

Nico reaches the end of the spell and there’s no ghost forthcoming.

“You sure you said that right?” her mentor hisses. His thumb rubs against the thick iron ring on his middle finger, rolls to the silver one next down, and back. Over and over, quick as thought and done without thinking, like biting nails.

There’s all that eloquent glaring turned on him over Nico’s shoulder again. “I been saying it for a long damn time, Stefan, I know the words.”

“Well we’ve got no ghost so say ‘em again!”

A few verses in she falters at the sharp, sudden rumble of an animal growl from somewhere in the dark. The bronze dagger is in Stefan’s hand in an instant. Nico lunges to one side for her calinda stick – metal-banded, thrice-blessed. Both track movement in the underbrush where the thin trees quake. The green scents of the foothills wash out under an unmistakable salt tang. A silent look passes between them: they’re at the ready and expecting one pissed-off ghost.

What comes crashing out first is white as a sheet but not dead yet. A spindle of an old man with blood on his hands comes tumbling out of the woods. Neither hunter has time to process this before a second figure follows. It’s lambent, glinting silvery-green like moonlight on waves, soaked head to toe and dripping water. It was a man too, once, on the younger side of middle aged with strong Cubano features. Now the forest shows through the other side of him and the semblance of skin that shows through ragged clothing is slick and mottled and bloated like a corpse dredged up from a riverbed. The fish-pecked remains of his lips curl; the snarl gurgling in his throat is distorted as if heard from underwater.

“Told you so,” Stefan snorts as they burst into action. “Told you it’s no mountain duppy, gyal, think you’d trust me by now!”

Nico cuts her eyes at him (but only because he’s facing the other way). Salt is useless here but cold iron will disrupt him like any ghost, so the bronze blade returns to its sheath with a snik and Stefan snaps his hand out to catch the calinda stick Nico tosses his way. The drowned man lunges like a tidal wave – then screams, outraged and animalistic, when the swipe of iron-inlaid wood causes his form to shatter into steam that reeks of putrid meat where it passes through. The older hunter’s on the defensive, shuffling to and fro, goading the spirit to hold its attention. His grin gleams in the dark.

And it’s enough to keep the ghost corralled near the pit they’ve dug where Nico sings, enough to keep its focus on him while she works the rite. Every time those iron bands scatter the spirit a little more of it’s drawn towards the driftwood bones they’ve carved. As surely as any Latin chant will push a ghost away hers binds it down. The bones shake with the dead man’s rage they’ve trapped him, smoke when doused with holy water, and at the end they burn, and burn, and burn.

They breathe.

“Took your time with that binding,” Stefan grouses, wiping sweat from his brow. He fights back a grin at the look his protégé shoots him.

“Gimme back my beau-stick, old man, I’m gonna beat you with it,” she snipes back. There’s no heat behind it – when he does return her cane she loops it behind her neck and over her wrists and stretches, muscle flexing under dark skin, instead of making good on her threat. “What d’you wanna do about the tourist?” She tilts her head towards the bloody-handed stranger – forgotten throughout the exorcism but still there – without looking at him.

Stefan sighs. With locals it tends to be easy; they tend to accept what they see with their own eyes, albeit with a lot of panicked prayer most of the time. Foreigners are more about denial and mental shutdowns, and the tension in both hunters’ stances is the sort that comes with bracing oneself for a load of annoying bullshit. He sucks in a breath, swinging his gaze over to the white man (who for his part looks as vaguely perturbed as the two of them do), but gets cut off before he can say much more than “Look, man–”

“Ideally, explain to him how constructing artificial remains to exorcise an untethered ghost works,” the stranger deadpans.

While Stefan sputters the younger hunter mutters _Thank you Olodumare, he’s not American_ under her breath and pitches her voice to carry – dropping out of patois without missing a beat. “Weeeell, look at you, John Hammond, you know some things?”

The man shifts his weight. A drop of red patters from his fingertips to the dirt and he casts a glare, mild and annoyed, at where it lands. Stefan eyes it as well. He nods a little but answers, “Not everything, by a wide margin. Vengeful spirits that aren’t barred by salt are new.”

“Welcome to Cuba,” Nico guffaws; but she shares a glance with her mentor, who is far, far less amused. They need a tourist hunter running around about as much as they need a tourist civilian having a breakdown about first contact. He nods sideways back the way they came and turns to leave.

Left between the two,  the young woman shrugs at the stranger, and grabs their duffel before she follows after.

“So that’s a no to the explanation then,” the man calls after them, but their work is done here. It’s not a plague-runner’s way to stick around.


End file.
